Exactly what it says on the Tin...

I mentioned in a previous post that I have recently been toying with Virtual Server 2005 - setting up some virtual servers at work....Well, this morning I was approached by another member of staff, who questioned the amount of disk space I had allocated on one of the drives. I had set up three dynamically expanding drives on each server, but the maximum available space was still not quite enough for my colleague's purposes. So I was left with the easy (hindsight is 20/20) task of adding more space to the disks. Sure, it would have been easy to set up another VHD, allocating the needed amount of space. But the disks were separated for Database placement, and adding another hard drive, though acceptable, would have been a dirty solution. My first assumption was that Virtual Server itself had to have this functionality in-built. After-all, the software that created the disks had to be able to resize them - right? Nope. It took a little google-ing to find a little tool that did exactly what i needed.

Vhd Resizer (freely available at http://vmtoolkit.com/) allowed me to resize an existing VHD (the Virtual Machine had to be shut down first obviously...) in about 4 mouse clicks. Furthermore, it allows changing of the drive type (dynamic/static), though I had no need to try out this additional functionality. It is by no means a fancy tool but it worked perfectly first time which is always a bonus! I added the new VHD (and removed the previous one) to the Virtual Machine, booted it back up and could see my extra space in Disk Manager...yes yes, it was an NT 4.0 Virtual Machine. Two clicks (highlighting the old partition and the new one) and holding down the ctrl key allowed me to combine these partitions in NT and after a quick reboot i had a nice big hard drive - courtesy of the nice people at vmToolkit. This nifty little tool saved me a ton of time and effort!

On a side note, vmToolkit offers a second tool - a VMDK to VHD converter - allowing VMWare images to be ported over to Virtual Server...which is nice!

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